[BUG] Claude CoWork does not support Windows 11 setups w/two hard drives and Documents on the D:\ drive.
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
- [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
- [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code
What's Wrong?
Trying to get Dispatch and scheduled tasks to work with skills to support my personal system and ran into an issue where cowork is struggling because my documents folder in windows is on the D: drive... Asked Claude to help me understand the cause and it said the fix is trivial for Anthropic. Please fix this.
What Should Happen?
Claude cowork should work seamlessly with windows 11 machines with multiple drives where user documents folder is on the d: drive.
Error Messages/Logs
Asked Claude to help me understand the cause and it said:
The root cause is a Claude Desktop bug: when running a task, it tries to hard-link the SKILL.md from D: to the session folder on C:, and Windows doesn't allow hard links across drive letters. Recreating tasks just creates more D: drive files.
Two things worth knowing:
Your Documents folder is likely redirected to D:. This is common on Windows setups with a secondary drive. Claude Desktop inherits that. You could redirect Documents back to C:, but that's a bigger system change.
This should be reported to Anthropic — the fix is trivial on their end (use fs.copyFile instead of fs.link for cross-device scenarios). You can submit feedback via the thumbs down button in Claude Desktop.Steps to Reproduce
Not sure of a generic how to recreate this:
My situation is that I have two drives on my Windows PC, with my documents folder defined as being on the D drive.
Claude Model
Sonnet (default)
Is this a regression?
No, this never worked
Last Working Version
_No response_
Claude Code Version
Claude CoWork for Windows - 1.569.0 (49894a)
Platform
Anthropic API
Operating System
Windows
Terminal/Shell
Other
Additional Information
_No response_
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11 Comments
Found 3 possible duplicate issues:
This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
I reviewed those 3 issues. They appear related but not a duplicate. The key issue is CoWork needs to support Windows 11 setups that have the User Documents configured on the D-Drive.
I am experiencing the same error, Opus said:
This is a common configuration, and Claude should support this!!!
This blocks a lot of what I want to do with CoWork right now :(
Fair easy fix to this solution, implement a fallback strategy to resolve this as the fs.link doesn't allow symlinks whereas copyFile would be a cleaner solution.
javascripttry {
await fs.link(source, target);
} catch (err) {
if (err.code === 'EXDEV') {
await fs.copyFile(source, target);
} else {
throw err;
}
}
It appears to be common issue and moving Documents folder to D: drive is quite common, especially when removing OneDrive from the system. This worked before and should work without "workarounds". The issue is especially weird in case one does not care where SKILL.md is stored. If I paste content of the SKILL.md into cowork, it will gladly execute _and_ save the configuration. But attempt to run configuration saved by Claude co-work will fail due to EXDEV issue. This basically prevents users from creating scheduled tasks implementing agent functionality. Using Desktop version of Claude Team
I have the exact same error message, but instead, both of my workspace and onedrive are on the same HD, but no parent folder in common. For some reasons Claude has written a file on my onedrive (while it shouldn't be allowed) instead of my workspace folder.
I see this is open for two weeks now. No one been assigned. And label was changed from bug to invalid. I see other folks are seeing the same or very similar problem. Is there something else that needs to be done to escalate this, to make sure that this is at least on their investigation list?
It appears that issues found by human are embarrassing to ai system, that's why label is 'Invalid' :) The bug is very real and easy to reproduce. Demonstrated to multiple colleagues who also thought I am doing something wrong and reproducible on multiple computers with Windows 11 Pro.
Steps to reproduce (example, there are multiple ways. Make sure that D:\Documents is the default folder. Remove any claude-related artefacts from D:\Documents)
Extension of the same bug. Remove everything created in the previous steps. Define work folder on C: drive, e.g. C:\Claude
Follow the steps 1-4. Observe the same result. Also, observe that despite D:\Document never mentioned in configuration, Claude still created D:\Documents\Claude for scheduled skills.
So, in fact we deal here with 2 bugs instead of 1:
Same problem here with Claude Team on Windows with redirected Documents folder on network drive by group policy.
Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.